In 2007, the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries released a report looking at the seismic safety of more than 3,000 schools and other public buildings. A new analysis from The Oregonian/OregonLive found that of the 138 schools in the Portland area that were considered at “high” or “very high” risk of collapsing, 110 of those continue to have students. And of those 110, 55 of them still have not had any major renovations. At the same time, some researchers are beginning to rethink whether the current “drop, cover and hold on” safety plan is the best option for students. Lizzy Acker is a reporter for The Oregonian/OregonLive. She joins us to share more on the seismic preparedness of Portland’s students and schools.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2007, the state of Oregon found that 138 schools in the Portland area were at “high” or “very high” risk of collapsing in an earthquake. Almost 20 years later, Lizzy Acker, a journalist at The Oregonian, decided to see what has happened with those schools. It turns out that students still attend 110 of them and 55 – half of them – still have not had any major renovations. At the same time, some researchers are beginning to question whether the current “drop, cover and hold on” training is the best option for students.
Lizzy Acker joins us now to talk about her four-part series on schools and seismic safety. Welcome to the show.
Lizzy Acker: Thank you.
Miller: So you are a reporter on the life and culture team and the author of the “Why Tho?” advice column which I love. How did you end up writing a major series of articles about seismic safety in schools?
Acker: Yeah, well, I have kind of an amazing job where I don’t get to only write about everything I want to write about, but sometimes I do. And actually this started, I interviewed Emma Pattee, who wrote the book “Tilt.” So that was a life and culture story because she was a Portland writer. And she wrote the book “Tilt,” which is about an earthquake hitting Portland, Cascadia Subduction Zone sort of event. She also did some reporting for Willamette Week about school seismic safety. I read her reporting, and I was like, “Well, this is interesting.” I think we could build on it. I’d like to know more about this.
At that time, our school reporter was busy, and she couldn’t do it right then. I was like, “I’ll do it.” And it became such a big story because my editors were like, “OK, but don’t just focus on Portland.” And it’s true, there’s been lots of reporting about schools in Portland. I’m so glad they did that because it gave me this opportunity to look at other districts and see what they’ve done. So, I did generally the Portland area. I looked at like 20 districts. And like you said, in 2007 … this is actually, it’s kind of a little bit of a complicated story.
I’ll try not to make it too complicated, but last year I did this experiment where I wrote about the weather for six months. They were just like, “You write about weather, see how people deal with that.” And we decided earthquakes counted as weather because we did. And I wrote about an earthquake that hit off of the Pacific coast and there was a tsunami warning. It was like December, I think. You might remember it, but there was no tsunami. However, I ended up talking to lots of scientists for that. So when I started this, I talked to them again and they were like, “Oh, have you seen this DOGAMI report?” DOGAMI is the department of … well, it’s a state agency.
Miller: Geology and Mineral Industries, something like that.
Acker: Yeah, it doesn’t really make sense, but they do lots of very cool work. They actually made these maps. If you’re ever on the coast, you should check their tsunami evacuation routes for anywhere you are on the coast. You put in your address, and it tells you how long you have to run or walk. I highly recommend it.
So they did this study in 2007. And I hadn’t heard about it. They went to every state safety building, like police offices, hospitals and things like that, as well as every single school in the state. They gave it this rating, which is sort of like a triage method. They look at the building, they find out how old it is, what kind of soil it’s on, where it is, and they gave it this rating, like a collapse rating.
So they did that in 2007 and then they never did it again, which is interesting. It’s not that they wouldn’t probably say, well, that’s a failure that we never did it again. It was sort of … at this time in 2007, there was a lot of interest growing. I mean, at that point, people knew about the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. It was not new information, but the legislature in Oregon was pushing for more funding and stuff like that. And in 2009, they started actually giving funds to school buildings to do seismic retrofits. The state of Oregon has a seismic retrofit program that gives grants of $2.5 million to school seismic retrofit projects – which seems like a lot, but it’s also not even close to enough.
Miller: Well, you note that the total that’s been spent on those grants over the years is not that much more than the retrofit, that’s largely a seismic retrofit, for one big building in Salem: the Oregon Capitol. And there’s also though … voters can say yes to bonds. And one of the, I guess, success stories that you point out is Hillsboro, a Portland area district that’s been really laser focused on seismic upgrades. What have they done?
Acker: Well, they have passed bonds, which is crucial. And then they’ve just focused that money on seismically upgrading all of their buildings and creating new buildings. So you can do seismic upgrades to an existing building, or you can build something new. And pretty much every building in Oregon, we’ll say that’s built after 2006 is something that we would call a benchmark building – try not to be too jargony about it. But that’s basically a building that’s built up to current seismic code. So they’ve built new buildings, for one, and then the buildings that they had that had seismic issues, they spent that money to fix.
Miller: You also found that Beaverton has made a lot of progress, and then there are districts like Estacada and Gladstone where voters have rejected bonds that would have gone towards seismic upgrades. And then Portland Public Schools are kind of middle ground. Obviously, the largest district in the state and with a ton of older buildings that a lot of which are unreinforced masonry. How much data do we have right now about seismic readiness in the state’s largest district?
Acker: It’s not great. I think you have to go back to look at the fact that Portland’s buildings, Portland Public School buildings are so old. They started building in the 1920s. So one thing that Beaverton and Hillsboro have is a smaller number of buildings that are mostly newer. I mean, they’re not new. I found this very interesting. I found this in my reporting that Portland built schools in the ‘20s, the ‘30s, the ‘40s, the ‘50s, the ‘60s. They built a building in 1966 and then they didn’t build another new school building until 1998. Since then, they’ve built, I think six schools, something like that. So these are really old buildings.
It’s not that they haven’t done any work on them since then. They’ve added on, they’ve definitely added on to these buildings, and they’ve done work. But it’s interesting to note that Oregon didn’t have a uniform building code until the ‘70s. So that means the vast majority of these buildings were built in a time when the code was basically like, they have to hold up, they have to stand up with their own weight and the weight of the wind. And there wasn’t an understanding that Oregon could get this massive kind of earthquake, because in Oregon, the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquakes are really big, but they don’t happen very often, at least not in human terms or in humans in the Pacific – I should say, white people in the Pacific Northwest terms.
Miller: It’s not just about money and you point out how just the incredible hundreds of millions or billions of dollars it would cost to retrofit all of these. How far along is Portland Public Schools even in deciding which schools to prioritize and what prioritizing would mean?
Acker: Right, it’s really, really hard and they are not … as far as I know, I don’t know where they are with it. Because this bond that passed, the most recent bond that passed in 2025, this year, they did commit $90 million of that bond to seismic retrofits, which is basically a fraction of what would actually be needed. The newest report shows that something like half of the buildings have seismic issues. It’s pretty serious. And Portland Public Schools enrollment is going down.
So there’s this other question of like, are they even going to keep all these schools open? And like I said before, this $2.5 million that the state grant gives is so small compared to what is needed. Some of these schools need $20 million worth of work. So are you going to spend $20 million to retrofit a school that then you’re going to shut down? First, they have to decide what schools are going to shut down, which, it’s not a popular thing. No one’s like, “Hey, shut my school down.” And I don’t think that they have made that decision yet. They kind of imposed this on themselves, but they said by September 1, they would basically have a list of prioritized schools – and it’s October 2 today, right? They still don’t have the list.
Miller: And they couldn’t even decide on the framework for how to make that decision.
Acker: Yeah, they haven’t yet. And then at the last facilities meeting, they didn’t even discuss it. I think you probably know this, but there’s a lot of facilities issues going on with Portland right now. Portland Public Schools, they’re trying to figure out how to finish rebuilding all the high schools, which is a massive project. And that is also kind of a bit stalled. So it’s really unclear when they’re actually going to decide which schools to do.
Miller: It’s interesting that it was this recent novel by Emma Pattee and then the Willamette Week article that led not just you to be researching this, but a lot of Portland area parents to think hard about this again, sort of force maybe some new parents or people who would rather not think about it.
It did remind me that 10 years ago, Kathryn Schulz had this Pulitzer Prize winning New Yorker article, that you also referenced in your articles, about the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake that opened a lot of folks’ eyes. It wasn’t new to geologists, and it wasn’t new to a lot of Oregonians, but it sharpened the focus.
Do you think that these moments have lasting effects? Or do you think that [when] they come, a lot of us are forced to think about the earthquake again … the earthquakes – it’s not just CSZs, there’s other as well.
Acker: Yeah. There’s lots of other possibilities.
Miller: But I’m wondering, do you think they have lasting effects on us, as a society?
Acker: That’s really interesting. I grew up in Oregon, and I feel like, probably starting in high school, I knew about this possible big earthquake. And I think that there’s different ways that people approach it here. Some people are super fatalistic about it: “An earthquake will happen, I will die. I don’t care.” After the initial like, “Let’s be scared about it again for a minute.” Then some people are like, “It’s not gonna happen in my lifetime, it doesn’t matter.” So I think that those are ways that it kind of dies out.
But what I’m really hopeful about when I’m writing is that I want people to understand this isn’t a “we’re all going to die” situation. All the scientists I’ve spoken to about this will tell you that a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake in Portland won’t be good, but it’s not like everybody’s going to die. It’s not going to be a gaping hole in the ground. This isn’t the end of the world, but in unsafe buildings, a lot of people could die.
And I don’t know if you were around in 1993. I was a kid in 1993 and there was an earthquake, the Spring Break Quake, and it was only like a 5.6 earthquake outside of Scotts Mills near Salem. We felt it a little bit. I was in Eugene somewhere, but it was 5 in the morning. Nobody was hurt, maybe like two people were hurt. There was almost no property damage, a little bit at the state Capitol. But Molalla High School, which was an old building, an unreinforced masonry building, the walls collapsed.
And I think that when I was reminded of that … because when I started this story, I completely forgot about it. But we have pictures of it. It wasn’t that long ago, like The Oregonian covered it and lots of people covered it because it was really the only damage to any building in the state.
Miller: The kids were not in the school then.
Acker: No kids were in the school, so nobody was hurt. But if there had been kids there, who knows what would have happened. And that is what I really want people to kind of take away from this, that it doesn’t have to be this sort of like “end-of-the-world scary movie.” Even Emma’s book, which I think is good, that version of an earthquake is very scary and big, and everything is falling apart.
But that’s not what I’m even talking about. I’m talking about a much smaller earthquake could do serious damage to these buildings and a brick hitting a kid in the head ... In lots of other situations across the world, there have been earthquakes that have caused school buildings to collapse and it’s really hard to even wrap your head around the tragedy of that. We think in like terms of a school shooting or something, if 10 or 20 kids were killed, it’s very hard to conceptualize 100 or more than 100 kids dying, but it could be bad.
Miller: Lizzy, thanks very much.
Acker: You’re welcome.
Miller: Lizzy Acker is a reporter for The Oregonian.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
